The Next Wave of Disruption
With an impact that extends from transportation to healthcare to manufacturing and just about every other industry, the Internet of Things (IoT) is garnering an increasing amount of attention. Goldman Sachs called IoT the “next mega-trend,” and wrote that: “The global industrial sector is poised to undergo a fundamental structural change akin to the industrial revolution as we usher in the IoT.”
Yet there are questions as to how quickly that can happen. Gartner had IoT at the Peak of Inflated Expectations in its 2015 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle with a five-to-ten year projection to the Plateau of Productivity.
This is understandable considering the challenges that must be addressed, including enabling legacy devices for connectivity, bridging disparate communication protocols, acquiring network and storage capacity, ensuring security and reliability, and implementing applications that deliver value and tangibly improve operations.
Despite these challenges, a wait-and-see attitude may be more risky than moving forward considering the breadth of applications and potential value of IoT to the business. The key is to move forward intelligently . There is an opportunity today for IoT to deliver a measurable return on investment using the right approach in the right application.
The right approach involves working from the inside of the IoT framework out. The right environment is the data center, which is the most fertile and IoT-ready setting in many organizations.
